Theodor Estermann
Theodor Estermann (born February 5, 1902 in Neubrandenburg , † November 29, 1991 in London ) was a British mathematician who dealt with analytical number theory.
Estermann was the son of a Jewish businessman from Lithuania, his mother was a corset maker from Latvia. He attended the Torah school in Hamburg, where he learned Hebrew and German until the family, as supporters of the Zionist movement, moved to Palestine (then Turkish) in 1914. There he attended school in Jerusalem. The family returned to Hamburg around 1918. Estermann studied mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen (he heard from David Hilbert , Edmund Landau , among others ) and the University of Hamburg , where he received his doctorate from Hans Rademacher in 1925 , with a topic from the theory of measure ( about Caratheodorys and Minkowski's generalizations of the concept of length ). He then went to Palestine, where his father had moved, and in 1926 on to England to study at University College London . In 1928 he received the D.Sc. After a short trip to Hamburg, he became an assistant in 1929 and a lecturer in 1931 at the University College. In 1940 he became a reader there and in 1965 a professor. He retired in 1969, but remained an Honorary Research Fellow until 1987. He then retired because of his dwindling eyesight.
Among other things, Estermann dealt with Kloosterman sums, the Waring problem , sieving methods, prime number distribution , representations of numbers as sums of squares, Goldbach's conjecture . In the context of the Goldbach conjecture, he proved that every sufficiently large even number can be represented as the sum of a prime number and an almost prime number with a maximum of 6 factors, which was tightened considerably by Alfréd Rényi in 1947 and to an almost prime number with Chen Jingrun in 1966 a maximum of 2 factors was tightened.
From 1948 he was a British citizen. He had been married to Tamara Pringsheim, a granddaughter of Alfred Pringsheim and the daughter of Olga Markowa Meerson and Heinz Pringsheim , since 1936 , and had six children with her.
His doctoral students include Heini Halberstam , Klaus Friedrich Roth , Robert Charles Vaughan .
His older brother Immanuel Estermann was a physicist.
Fonts
- Introduction to modern prime number theory , Cambridge Tracts, 1952
- Complex numbers and functions , University of London, Athlone Press 1962
Web links
- Theodor Estermann in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
- Obituary in the London Mathematical Society 1994
- Literature by and about Theodor Estermann in the bibliographic database WorldCat
Individual evidence
- ↑ Estermann, Journal for Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 168, 1932, p. 106
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Estermann, Theodor |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 5, 1902 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Neubrandenburg |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 29, 1991 |
| Place of death | London |